Lou Reed Died Doing Tai Chi, Says Wife Laurie Anderson

Performance artist, musician and sculptor Laurie Anderson, who also happened to be the loving wife to the recently deceased Lou Reed, revealed that her departed husband died while doing something he loved: Tai Chi.

In a letter that started, “To our neighbors,” Anderson detailed her and her husband’s love for Springs, New York.

“Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs,” Anderson says in the letter, which was published by The East Hampton Star. “And we made it!”

Next, she details something about Reed that you may not have known. “Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.”

While it’s that one of the greatest rock musicians in the world is now gone, it’s comforting to know he died doing something he loved.

Another recent tribute to Reed came from fellow rock pioneer, punk poet and fixture of the New York scene, Patti Smith, who offered up her own remembrance of Lou Reed with a touching memorial piece penned for the New Yorker. You really should read the whole thing.

“He had black eyes, black T-shirt, pale skin. He was curious, sometimes suspicious, a voracious reader, and a sonic explorer,” Smith wrote in the heartfelt tribute, rife with literary and cultural references. “An obscure guitar pedal was for him another kind of poem. He was our connection to the infamous air of the Factory. He had made Edie Sedgwick dance. Andy Warhol whispered in his ear. Lou brought the sensibilities of art and literature into his music. He was our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingman and Lorca its persecuted.”